Number of Vehicle Recalls in 2013 Grew to Nearly 22 Million, Which Automaker Recalled the Most Cars?

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a report showing vehicle recalls increased in 2013 from the previous year.To put things in perspective, around 15.6 million new cars were sold in the U.S. in 2013. But a whopping 22 million vehicles were recalled that same year. The recalls spread over 632 different campaigns that were initiated either by the government based on consumer complaints or by the automakers themselves.Toyota tallied up the most recalls of any automaker last year, calling back almost 5.3 million cars. Around 1.6 million of these resulted from two campaigns issued to fix spontaneously-deploying airbags. While many interpret these numbers as a sign of continued quality problems at Toyota, others view it as an effort by the company to better report potential errors than it has in the past.Chrysler Group scored the dubious honor of second place on the recall list, with 4.7 million recalls over 36 different campaigns. The most notorious of these was perhaps the recall of older Jeep Grand Cherokee and Liberty models, a recall that Chrysler initially refused. But later Chrysler acquiesced to recalling 1.6 million of these cars due to concerns that an improper gas tank design may result in fires during rear-impact crashes.A host of other automakers made up the remainder of the list. Honda and Acura came in third with 2.8 million recalls. Hyundai ranked fourth and Ford came in fifth. And despite its large size, General Motors came in ninth place with fewer recalls. Mercedes-Benz had the fewest recalls of any major automaker in the U.S.However, NTHSA qualified its results by saying that the rankings "should not be interpreted as an indication of what NHTSA thinks of any particular manufacturer or its products.""These tallies are not used to evaluate manufacturers or to evaluate which recalls the agency may need to investigate or monitor,” the agency’s report says. “There are a host of reasons why a manufacturer could have more or fewer recalls in a given year.” Some of these factors, the agency says, include the introduction of new technology or ways automakers measure risk. The agency also says that larger automakers tend to have more recalls than smaller manufacturers that make fewer vehicles.Source: The New York Times

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